PART D: Implications for the Work of Principals
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There is considerable evidence to suggest
that the Principal's job is getting harder, that we work longer hours,
in a climate that is more uncertain than ever before. This is entirely
congruent with social, organisational and work trends across the world.
But policy, rather than reflecting this complexity, is tending to simplify,
narrow down the agendas to something that appears to be manageable and
is easily saleable to an imaginary public. Unfortunately, society, young
people, neighbourhoods and the task of schooling are not amenable to such
reductionism. This policy failure leaves school Principals and staffs largely
unsupported in their attempts to find more holistic responses. Political
and bureaucratic attempts to allocate and specify costs and responsibilities
in minute detail, to minimise risks from litigation and poor publicity,
and to present an image of rational management create a only superficial
neatness. The current lived reality for Principals is one of patchy communication,
inefficient delivery of the necessities to deliver policy promises, isolation
and a climate of performativity, where coercion, blame and punishment are
an organisational dark side that rarely occurs, but is always possible.
It is as if each day presents a series of tests, high risk activities that
could go wrong, each requiring immediate response. The prize for dealing
with every test is to go onto the next one.
The knowledge and skills that Principals
now require are not adequately recognised nor reflected in professional
development programs. The integrated and contingent exercise of professional
practices across multiple sites on simultaneous tasks is not mirrored in
the check list approach to competencies. The personal habits and dispositions
necessary to do the job in the current circumstances are neither articulated
nor recognised in selection processes. Lacking the ability to 'see' what
the Principal's work entails, current industrial arrangements fail to build
in and reward all that school leadership and management now demands.
This section builds on the analyses made
in the previous three to elaborate further on these points. It is primarily
strategic and oriented towards supporting Enterprise Agreement negotiations.
The paper and this section are not intended to be a detailed log of claims.
It is the work of SASPA to draw out what specific issues are most important
to their membership and what resources and support they might need to put
on the table during the Enterprise Bargaining process.
The following issues are the keys to understanding
the current and emerging role of state school secondary Principals.
Leading and managing a school in a context
of paradoxes and tensions.
Many of the educational policy trends that
create tensions and paradoxes arise from global changes and state policy.
(These have been detailed in previous sections.) Jill
Blackmore (40) provides a useful summary
:
- A focus on top down change and hierarchies
when the reform research suggests that whole school collaborative effort
is most likely to succeed
- Top down accountability mechanisms that
accentuate divisions between Principals and staff and stifle the creativity
and local accountability intended by devolved responsibility
- The shift from educational leader to business
manager and entrepreneur when the leadership literature is emphasising
moral and ethical concerns
- The reasons for change have shifted outside
schools and redirected the work of Principals to image management not student
learning needs
- Change is instigated by the market rather
than by the school or Principal
The reasons for change are not examined.
Improved leadership is seen as a solution to the management of change,
which is necessarily good because policy has good intentions. This is despite
the evidence of the social inequities that can be exacerbated by change.
The collaborative ('female leadership') style is stressed in the literature
whereas job descriptions and/or selection procedures privilege financial
and business management
In addition, there is a fundamental tension
that arises from the combination of political and educational time scales.
Because schools are the formal and public social institutions intended
to pass on knowledge, skills, understandings and values to the next generation,
Principals and teachers must have a long term view and commitment. It is
the responsibility of the profession to work with parents to develop a
holistic approach to education that will not only meet both the immediate
needs of children and young people, but also provide the basis for their
ongoing life long learning. There is a balance to be struck between long
and short term goals.
A holistic and long term view of a child'
s education takes much longer than the four year policy cycle of elected
governments. As each successive government seeks to mark itself off from
others, there are often significant changes in emphases in policy direction
and focus. The Principals task is to manage them, to meet the requirements
of the government of the day. At the same time, the longer term, broader,
comprehensive conception of learning and schooling children for life, must
also be maintained - because this is the professional responsibility of
all who work in schools. When a government policy agenda narrows or becomes
skewed in particular directions ( see Sections B
and C) then Principals must manage a complexity
of demands and pressures. The current political modus operandi for the
sale of the new policy agenda demonises the policy projects it wishes to
replace by 'naming and shaming' the systems and schools that delivered
them. Balancing the long and short term occurs at the same time as the
(politically) manufactured fears of parents, and anger and low morale of
staff.
2. Increase in managerial work.
A number of policy changes have combined
to produce a significant increase in work for Principals. They can be summarised
as:
Devolved responsibilities.
Institutional reform, the decentralisation of decision making about people,
money, and buildings, has taken place in the context of significant reduction
in the number of Central Office staff who were previously required to do
the same tasks. Some of these tasks are still done in the traditional way,
but by less people, because new technologies have not been developed, and
because alternative procedures have not been introduced. (The system of
paper files is perhaps the most obvious example.) In South Australia, job
shedding has been going on for many years and while schools were protected
for some time from budgetary cuts, they did pick up the additional work.
In recent years, schools have been subject to staff reductions, both in
teaching and in school support positions. Not only did initial savings
from decentralisation not pass on to schools, but they then also continued
to take on more responsibilities at the same time as there were actual
reductions in staffing. Given the long hours now worked by school Principals
and staff involved in school decision making committees, it is most unlikely
that any further shift in work from the Centre to the school can be accomplished
without the transfer of the resources necessary to do the tasks successfully.
Non government schools typically have a high status position requiring
business qualifications to deal with many financial and management tasks:
Joint Principal Associations are on record (41) arguing that any devolution trials must include
such a position in order to avoid the Principal becoming a glorified accountant.
(b) Risk Prevention
At the same time, the risk environment requires increased documentation
and administrative time. Contributing to a significant increase in Principal
work load are:
- Occupational and worker compensation legislation
- a system of insurance for both employees and employers. It requires considerable
procedural conformity across sites and standardised operational procedures
and record keeping. These can be intensely time consuming.
- The need to be responsive to parents and
community concerns and complaints, and to follow due process so as to avoid
interference from legal or quasi legal bodies. This often involves considerable
time and file management.
- Increasing parent complaints is an inevitable
corollary of the mix of individualised consumer oriented education policy,
a tabloid media, and the decline in community based services for families
under high stress. Such complaints often hinge around the threat and sometimes
the presence of journalists, and inevitably involve many hours of Principal
time.
- Risk management policies are preventive
measures required to hedge against potential litigation and/or cost. Significant
confidentiality, record keeping and communication are now required of Principals
- see for example the critical incident and bomb threat procedures that
become more elaborate each year.
(c) Accountability measures.
Current reform combines an educational policy focus on student output data,
with the public sector reform agendas of quality assurance, and changes
in financial management practice. In the school this results in a significant
change in data collection. It is true that schools did keep at least some
of the data that is now required. But now they all have to adjust to a
common format and framework, in addition to collecting new information
in the new forms. The success of this policy depends on the introduction
of standardised software which ensures common data categories across schools
so that uniform systems information can be presented to multiple audiences.
The process of developing appropriate platforms and their introduction
into schools has been troubled. Obviously additional work is always required
as one management regime changes to another, as people learn what is required,
and as there is double handing of data for safety. Principals believe that
the costs of such work in schools have either been significantly underestimated
- or under-funded, because there isn't the money to do the job properly.
(Calculations of such under-funding have recently been documented in a
Coopers and Lybrand study (42)
of similar reforms across Europe.) The successful implementation of accountability
requirements relies heavily on additional work picked up at the school
level, based on the goodwill and commitment the Principal is able to generate
within the school for the task. When such reform is couched in a rhetoric
of being good for students, and in reality its prime purpose is to benefit
the system and therefore all schools, and if the reform has been politically
sold to the public with considerable gloss and fanfare when the reality
is much more hesitant, this is not an easy task.
3. Work in a re- adjusted hierarchy.
Edward Deming, the father of TQM, suggested
that at least 80 percent of the problems in any organisation are not to
do with individual people but with systemic structures and deep operating
principles and practices. Some of the premises of current public sector
management and organisation are based on the fundamental belief in the
separation of policy from delivery - the prevention of service providers
corrupting policy goals with self serving interests - and performativity
- the belief that specifying performance goals and then contracting individual
people or units to deliver them maximises efficiency, effectiveness and
accountability. Lines of reporting, accountability, and scrutiny are made
clearer. (These practices are criticised (43) not only by Deming, but also many others: that
individualised performance management and reward works against team work
is obvious.) All recent restructures and realignments of the South Australian
education organisation have sought to make more clear the allocation of
duties and responsibilities. What is significant is that they alter the
relationship that Principals have both with staff and with Central Office.
The organisational charts show increased distance between each organisational
level, and supervisory responsibilities articulated in, for example, performance
management policy and work reports, place the onus for delivery of particular
outcomes at particular organisational points. However, many of these responsibilities
are not so neatly delineated and are dependent on interconnecting and organic
systems.
An example serves to illustrate. The Principal's
responsibility to ensure that teaching within the school is of a high quality
is highly dependent on the teachers that are allocated to the school -
a combined central office and local responsibility. Teachers who do not
easily adjust their methods to a new environment are likely to become the
subject of peer and Principal concern and student and parent complaints.
Dissatisfaction that emerges in parent surveys associated with the annual
report, for example, will reflect poorly on the Principal who may be perceived
to be an inadequate manager because her/his staff are not 'performing'.
This in turn may impact on the Principal's work report and their subsequent
career path. While knowledgeable line managers may use personal knowledge
to modify or avert such an outcome, the actual allocation of blame/responsibility
is the potential written into performance based individualised job descriptions.
In this example, and in many other cases, the responsibility that is allocated
to an individual level and position, is in reality a systemic one.
The effects of performance based hierarchies
can be described as producing:
(a) Disincentives for learning.
Simplistically described organisational relationships that mistakenly allocate
culpability create low trust between levels of the hierarchy. They also
produce defensive behaviour as people are reluctant to expose skill areas
that need improvement or problems that are difficult to manage to supervisors
who are required to comment on their performance. Such personalised accountability
measures work against a collaborative learning culture and professional
growth, the rhetoric espoused in performance based policies.
(b) Distance between Principal and staff.
A combination of factors works towards transforming the relationship between
Principals and their staffs. Increased administrative tasks, the necessity
of being out of the school for substantial periods of time, site responsibility
for the implementation of new policies which staff may not willingly accept
work together with individualised performance management to make the Principal
more remote from the everyday world of the classroom. This is a significant
impediment to school based reform which relies on trusting and collaborative
professional relationships.
(c) Managerialisation of the Principalship.
Because it is now harder for Principals to engage in detailed curriculum
work and discussions within the school, some Principals in other states
have felt their work to have more in common with general public sector
management than with the professional work of teachers. In South Australia,
this is not the case. Despite the trend to increasing remoteness from the
immediate world of teaching, Principals see their work as inextricable
from education: they practice a meta pedagogy that underpins all leadership
and management tasks. This position is maintained against the flow of organisational
arrangements.
(d) Declining relationships between schools
and Central Office.
Performativity and the separation of roles and decision making within the
organisation also has an impact on the way that schools and their Principals
interact with Central Office. Central Office staff have been more strictly
divided into performance based units. School criticism of the delivery
of service provided by such units may well directly appear in quality assurance
procedures, unit supervisor's work reports, complaints to superiors. One
response by unit staff to such school concerns then is defensiveness, another
is to move to meet the problem - but as in the example of Principals and
staff, some of the solution may well be out of their control or influence.
Within a low trust environment such compartmentalisation and quasi - contractualised,
performative relationships quickly lead to blame. There are many examples
of strong Central and local personal commitments and skills overcoming
such situations. The issue, however, is that it is the way the system is
geared to work.
(e) Extra time commitments devoted to
overcoming organisational blocks.
Principals and Central Office staff alike have had to adjust their patterns
of work in order to put in the time required to establish the personal
trust that is now structured out of the system. Corporate values and a
common organisational culture rely on greater levels of autonomy and mutuality,
performativity for teams not individuals and only for those things where
there is not a diffuse and holistic responsibility. Such organisational
characteristics cannot easily be established in segmented and balkanised
organisations.
4. Work in the context of scarcity.
Recent moves by the South Australian government
to legislate for a goods and services fee to be levied on parents and the
findings of the Senate Committee on Education, Employment and Training
(published in Not a Level Playground)(44), confirm that government funding alone is not sufficient
to run a school. Additional funds must be found from non government sources.
It is now commonplace for Principals and school administrative staff to
spend considerable amounts of time chasing resources.
This takes different forms in different schools:
In schools that serve the poorest communities, Commonwealth funds account
for, on average, 25 percent of their budgets (45). Since such funds are allocated, per capita, on
the basis of School Card, which is also the substitute for the parent Goods
and Services charge, there is considerable pressure on targeted schools
to ensure that everyone eligible for School Card is registered and approved.
These schools often allocate considerable administrative time to contacting
families so that the Principal can sight the relevant welfare documentation
purely in order to get sufficient funds to run the programs budgeted for
in the previous year.
Other schools may require substantive renovation or the provision of facilities
that are standard for schools built at a different time. Principals of
such schools can be found persuading the bureaucracy to make the particular
facilities a spending priority, finding potential ways to share costs through
establishing partnerships with community or local government organisations,
devoting time and energy to the local and political lobbying that now seems
to be required if scarce public funds are to allocated. (Indeed all school
Principals now spend considerable time on facilities matters; where it
is question of maintenance and the school has the required budget this
is also time consuming, but there is an immediate and tangible result.)
Country schools spend considerable time juggling school funds, staffing,
distance education costs and enrolments. Many rural communities have no
capacity for fundraising and no other choice for education than the nearest
high or area school. Current allocations insufficiently recognise the difficulties
of providing curriculum choice, extra curricular options, professional
development and information technology access in the country and the subsequent
additional demands this makes of country Principals to find the necessary
funds.
There are also policy created resource problems
that are common to all schools and Principals. The introduction of the
new technologies into schools has created new pressures to supplement the
government allocation. Principals and administrative staff now spend time
searching for the 'best deal' and for cost effective maintenance solutions
in addition to the requirement to provide intranets and sufficient hardware
to meet the expectations of parents and deliver the government policy.
All school Principals are now much more heavily
involved in networking, and in fundraising and entrepreneurial activity.
This takes many forms - ranging from writing grant applications, attending
a large range of neighbourhood meetings and organisations, negotiating
partnerships with community organisations, organising school fetes and
other fund raising activities, running school based small businesses to
seeking sponsorship from the private sector. It is worth noting that independent
schools often have specific positions devoted to fundraising and public
relations, closely connected activities, since they see that this is not
only a specialised role requiring specific expertise, but is also one that
Principals should not be doing - their particular expertise being professional
and pedagogic.
The policy surrounding such resource acquisition
activity is now woefully inadequate and the substantive ethical issues
that underpin the activities of cash strapped schools are left to individual
Principals and their School Councils or in some cases, clusters of schools,
to determine. Further devolution and/or failure of government funding to
keep pace with politically created community expectations could well see
Principals having to spend even more time on resources related matters.
This is unacceptable because it works directly against the imperatives
for educational reform.
5. A complexity of reform tasks.
Schools are now enmeshed in far reaching,
major systemically initiated and controlled curriculum, structural and
cultural changes. The magnitude of the changes, or 'policy complex' as
it is sometimes known, are seen by policy makers at a distance, and through
one lens by the managers of each separate change project who cannot understand
why schools cannot (most often articulated by their Principals), muster
suitable enthusiasm. Changes include:
(a) Curriculum.
A shift to outcomes based assessment.
The pedagogical underpinning of Key Competencies and the Statements and
Profiles is that students should work in various ways towards demonstrable
learning outcomes. That this is methodologically contested by advocates
of constructionism, by those working towards inclusive equitable curriculum,
and by a range of learning theorists (46 ) is left to schools to sort out. That it requires
considerable additional data collection by classroom teachers and relies
on some significant shifts in syllabus becomes a matter for negotiation
and disputation. The rate of implementation, regardless of the need for
major revisions of what was only a first attempt at a curriculum developed
away from students, becomes the stuff of school and system wide discussion
and manoeuvring. At both the school and system level, the role of Principals
is considerable. It is they who must provide the link between the system
and the staff and who must take responsibility for what occurs in their
schools.
The rapid diversification of the postcompulsory curriculum.
At the same time as maintaining the traditional curriculum pathways, some
of which are still in need of major revision to meet the needs of many
students, schools are now involved in designing vocational courses to meet
externally developed industrial competencies. This raises not only the
rather obvious issues of time, but more difficult questions related to
course content and delivery (what teachers might think of as pedagogy and
epistemology) where there exist considerable historically based philosophical
differences between the training and school sectors. To these are added
the necessity for liaison with training providers, industry and employers,
the cost of industry approved equipment and materials and the credentialling
of staff. While there is considerable good will among school staff for
vocational education, they are rather less tolerant of the politically
inspired exhortations to get many such courses in place as quickly as possible.
Managing the delicate balance of staff workload and morale, being involved
in the educational debates, and negotiating with cluster colleagues, Central
Office staff, community and industry can be a hefty impost on Principals
and other members of the school administrative team. The prospect of now
adding to this pot pourri the development of school based options for those
being denied income support, and for whom only a paltry per capita allowance
is proferred, is not welcomed.
The shift to fully networked schools
While politicians may like to have their photo opportunities with children
and computer screens, the reality of going digital is far less simple.
The development of school curriculum and administrative intranets, and
the curriculum and teaching method work that must be done in order to move
from 'chalk and talk' to learning with, in and through information and
communication technologies, make significant new demands on Principals
and teachers. In addition to learning how to use the technologies for themselves
( a time consuming process that involves immersion in the medium), teachers
must then begin the slow, collaborative, intellectual work of changing
their teaching methods and curricula. Principals must not only do this,
but also become absolutely familiar with administrative software, in order
to lead and make the school wide decisions about budgets, room modifications,
equipment purchasing arrangements and fundraising. While there is little
difficulty in persuading parents that computers are a priority, staff often
become extremely frustrated by the amount of school time and money that
is devoted to the new demands, as they displace, in the short term, the
other ongoing and necessary expenditure of effort and funds. Principals
have been on a rapid learning curve with digital technologies and recent
moves in Victoria to make computer literacy a condition for appointment
to the Principalship (47) indicate that this
will continue to be an area of immense pressure.
A Move to more student centred approaches
Despite actual reductions in school staffing that make it more difficult
to address teacher - student ratios and new kinds of para- professional
staff work organisation, many secondary schools have moved to substantially
alter the ways in which they group, move and teach students. These include
timetables that allow for longer lessons, part time attendance and team
work to support thematic and integrated curricula: re- arrangement of school
buildings to create sub schools and small spaces for private study and
tutorials: staffing approaches that support the development of strong teacher
-student relationships and reduce the number of contacts for both students
and staff: negotiated curricula approaches that allow for collaborative
work that requires real life learning, research skills and higher order
thinking. Such changes do not occur without the leadership of the Principal,
particularly if, as is the case here, such efforts are only marginally
supported in aspects of system policy.
(b) An increased localism.
While South Australia does not yet have full scale devolution, there are
substantial numbers of tasks devolved to the local level (this is discussed
in Section C). However, what is equally important
and often very time consuming are:
- Maintaining relationships and networks
in the local area
What often appears to be school based reforms, such as vocational education,
dealing with families and young people in crisis, developing a curriculum
that builds on students' strengths, interests and knowledges, are significantly
enhanced if the school has strong ties with its communities. Tapping into
local job networks, finding mentors for young people, locating a person
to help out with a particular problem, getting access to specific local
sites and resources must largely be left to those who are not bound by
daily schedules of student contact. In most cases, it is therefore the
administrative team who do this liaison with local government, local churches
and service clubs, and with the key community leaders. In addition, such
community liaison also makes sure that school is visible in the community
and that there is an information flow between the school and its neighbourhood
- something that is increasingly necessary in a marketised environment.
- Dealing with information, local concerns
and complaints.
Much is gained and lost in the way the school handles its information and
communication. This goes far beyond the production of newsletters, procedures
for handling primary school transition, pictures in the local Messenger
press and the ritual of student report evenings - although these are important.
The local grapevine thrives on soap opera style stories of, amongst other
things, the goings on at the local school. A conflict among students, a
new learning programme that is insufficiently negotiated or explained or
is just contentious in its own right, the existence of particular subgroups
with very particular views and values - these are not rarities. They are
the everyday of the Principals work and can take considerable time to manage.
Explaining contemporary approaches to teaching literacy and numeracy, informing
about and defending the Departmental approach to corporal punishment or
to exclusion and suspension are regular occurrences. While none of these
in themselves are difficult, together they shape the Principal's time in
significant ways. Long term issues always get put aside for these immediate
questions. They are increasing in intensity and frequency (see Section B) and are only known to line managers when they
are not resolved. They are then largely invisible, albeit acknowledged,
aspects of the Principals' work.
(c) An embattled public education system.
The impact of several years of public criticisms of the public education
system, of forced transfers due to declining enrolments, of incentives
to leave the profession and of the political belittling of teachers cannot
be over emphasised. The morale question is one that is often described
in terms of an aging profession, but this explanation glosses over these
crucial factors. It is not that middle aged teachers and Principals do
not have energy anymore, or have somehow become less committed to their
chosen vocation. Rather it is that they question why they should continue
to work extraordinarily long hours, in a consuming job, for a greedy organisation
that does not reward or even thank those who do so.
What is also often ignored is that many schools
are not suffering from general malaise. Principals and administrative teams
can, and do, support and shape school cultures that are positive, enthusiastic,
hard working, and highly productive. They do this by paying careful attention
to staff learning and working conditions, by dealing sympathetically and
fairly with difficulties and conflicts and by creating a sense of common
endeavour and purpose. This is time consuming and vital. The difficulty
is that such schools do not feel part of a common and holistic government
supported system when schooling and teachers are under constant scrutiny
and potential ideological attack.
A government system would do more than rely
on local and individual Principal efforts to improve morale and the status
of teaching and public schools. Well funded system wide marketing, comprehensive
public information about contemporary educational approaches and methods
of introducing policy initiatives that do not rely for their rationale
on denigration of what exists, would be a start. Recognition of issues
such as teacher - student ratio and professionally supported learning would
go further.
An hierarchical approach to reform.
The current policy approach is one of top
down change. Both the Federal and state governments develop policies at
a distance from schools, albeit with some consultation, some times, with
peak bodies (including those representing Principals). The task of schools
is therefore one of implementation. Difficulties in meeting prescribed
timelines or in following policy prescriptions are regarded as an implementation
problem, rather than to do with the nature of the policy, or its interaction
with other policy demands, or the specific ongoing needs and plans of specific
schools. Training that accompanies policy is often geared to uncritical
acceptance of the new regime. Principals' collective activity often then
centres on negotiating a staged implementation, or in a worst case scenario,
in banning the particular program. (The implementation of the nationally
agreed and developed benchmarks is a current case in point.)
The state approach is also sometimes based
on the notion of 'adopt and adapt', using strategies such as pilot programs,
trials, focus schools, and contracted-out school based action research.
This is both a recognition that schools contain practical pedagogical knowledge
that has considerable modifying effect on expert conceptions of possible
teaching and learning improvements, and that policies are changed to fit
particular circumstances. While this is still top down, it recognises and
values policy refraction, the local interpretations of policies designed
at a distance from schools.
Such an approach has two important underpinnings:
- An understanding that the school is not
an empty vessel to be filled up with the latest reform agenda
- A reliance on the modifications that occur
at the local level to generate the desired reform
This has important ramifications for understanding
the role of the Principal because such a view of policy implementation,
the adoption and adaptation at the local level, relies on the Principal
being an educational reform leader and manager. This is well recognised
in the literature on effective reform (38) which stresses the crucial importance of Principals:
creating the leadership depth and structures that enable professional and
community participation, articulating strategies that make long term reform
possible and negotiating opportunities and dealing with potential difficulties
along the reform road.
What is not currently built into the structures
and practices of school systems in general, including South Australia's,
is the capacity to build on bottom up school initiated reform or the transformation
of policy initiatives into much richer and more diverse locally relevant
reforms. Such policy diffraction and innovation are precisely what is encouraged
in the new learning and knowledge based organisations of the private sector
(such as the software industry). It is this capacity, based in looser and
high trust relationships, that makes significant improvements and conceptual
leaps. This however is not the pattern of schooling generally, around which
there is both community and government conservatism, tending much more
to control and regulate. This is a blinkered view of change and one that
hinders school systems coming to terms with the massive social shifts,
paradoxes and tensions (see Section B).
Even if innovation is not the aim, but gradual
change that sticks, top down policy approaches are ill advised. The development
of future policy and reform directions- if they are to be well grounded-
depends on what happens in schools - what works and what doesnt,
what new directions are found. In other words, future policy relies on
policy refraction, tailoring and modifying at the local level and feeding
back the information into the system. Where this is not allowed, when policy
is expected to be uncritically implemented -despite policy overload, unrealistic
timelines, untested or exclusive pedagogies - or where policy fails to
meet current school practices, plans and needs - then the Principal may
be placed in a situation where one of two unpalatable choices are forced:
To follow the policy prescription despite knowing that it needs modification
in order to be successful. A less than satisfactory result is produced
for the system, but also more importantly, for students and staff
To modify the policy prescription so that benefits to students and staff
are maximised. Afterwards, there may be an attempt to describe the (forbidden)
modification in the original terms of the policy to the system, or a pretence
that the modification did not occur.
Either of these two choices is unpalatable. However, professional practice
and ethics require Principals to act in the best interests of their students
and we might hazard a guess that the situation of partial or altered policy
implementation is more commonly what occurs. Recognition of the necessity
of policy refraction and recognition of the depth of the Principal's reform
role are both required.
Lack of recognition of difference.
Current policy has a contradictory approach
to the variety that already exists and might be further produced in the
system. While federal schools policy encourages market choice between schools
it also acts to ensure that they conform to curriculum frameworks, and
state policy encourages flexible school based budgeting within tight accountability
frameworks [see Section C]. However, the questions
about difference are greater than just being about regulation and flexibility.
Failure to recognise the different demands of different schools means that
there are sometimes unrealistic and uniform expectations of outcome, style,
and school priorities placed on Principals. In a society where :
- there is an increasing
gap between rich and poor(48),
- matters of culture and race have become
highly inflammatory and divisive,
- some schools more than others will be required
to take on early school leavers forced back into school by government fiat,
- some schools may well lose up to a quarter
of their budgets if Commonwealth poverty funds are redirected,
- declining school enrolments force responses
that range from image management to cooperative activity,
- parent flight to more prestigious schools
is a constant threat,
- there are clearly more differences amongst
schools than those named as market choice.
Failure to recognise such differences and
build responses into the practices of the system can be seen in two examples:
Principal classification systems and Principal career paths.
(a) Classification
The production of a standard job and person specification for Principals
that can be marginally modified to suit each school in local selection
processes, fails to recognise the very real differences between schools.
A Principal classification system that relies on describing complexity
through the indicators of size and budget is a simplistic solution to dealing
with the different demands placed on school Principals. This is an ongoing
issue and requires continued attention. It is clear that simplistic indicators
are inadequate. It has not and will not be easy to find some equity between
schools that have rapidly increasing welfare and discipline burdens combined
with rapidly declining resources, those that are under pressure to provide
a highly diverse curriculum to a small rural population and those that
attempt to meet the expectation of demanding middle class parents. However,
a combination of factors that represent complexity is likely to be more
equitable than the personnel equivalent of a narrow standardised test.
(b) Career paths
At present there is no clear career pathway leading to the Principal's
position. A series of job descriptions is the best we can do to summarise
the knowledge, skills and understandings (5) that might form the basis of such a pathway. Such
a pathway would begin from the base of teacher knowledge and add to it
systematic learning about for example, the history and sociology of school
administration, the cultural practices of Principals, the technologies
of leadership and management, and theories of school reform. This learning
may require formal study. Such systematic learning would have a practical
component that would have at its heart the development of the habits and dispositions (6) necessary
to do the Principal's job. Once appointed as a Principal a menu of professional
learning opportunities would be available for Principals so that, once
past their initial period of generally learning about the job, they could
go on to develop to a sophisticated level the specific skills required
for the specific school in which they were located. Continued learning
to facilitate transfer to other specific sites, to maintain current professional
knowledge, and to acquire more systems based knowledge and experience would
logically follow. Options for ongoing learning might include attendance
at national and international conferences, university courses, paid leave
for observation, exchanges and placements in industry. This would provide
support for the differences among schools as well as ensuring that each
had a Principal who was actively engaged in professional practice. The
notion of a staged career pathway could be enshrined in salary packaging
arrangements and also provide a focus for the Leadership Centre beyond
the necessary immediate technical management associated with systemic priorities.
The broader philosophical questions surrounding
difference now have little arena for either discussion or action. Socioeconomic
disadvantage has been reduced to the collection of test data on literacy
and early intervention and remediation programmes, gender to legislative
adherence and some small projects, multiculturalism is now a largely unfunded
policy consumed by the related but not equivalent matters surrounding LOTE.
It is the lack of a systemic approach to educational and curricular justice
that lies behind the current impasses around difference that underpin both
the classification and career path exemplars. Equity has largely been reduced
to a technical matter of collecting output data around the achievement
of under theorised groups, rather than an active engagement in current
theories and debates, a culture of systemic learning about educational
justice and direct support for action ( See Section
B). This not only affects Principals in their own careers, but also
hinders their work in schools.
Work in a high pressure context.
The pace and nature of educational reform
in South Australia has specific characteristics. We have been slower than
other states in moving to institutional change through devolution. We have
been more thorough in our implementation of the national curriculum statements
and profiles. We have dealt with the vocational training and postcompulsory
agendas more slowly than some other states. Our apparent retention rates
are plummeting while our part time attendance is the highest in the country,
indicating that school reform around part time school - paid work options
might be proceeding more quickly than in other states. Teachers and Principals
remain part of the same professional union unlike our counterparts in some
other states.
However, there are some things that are common
across the country and, indeed, internationally. Principals are now much
more unsupported and much more responsible for their schools than ever
before. The combined effects of:
- global trends that are unrecognised or simplified
by policy but are manifest in the students, community and school that demand
attention and action from Principals (see Section B)
- the decline in advisory structures and the
simultaneous shift to quality assurance and performance based line management
relationships that isolate Principals, scrutinise them closely and make
them totally responsible for their schools ( see Section
C)
- market pressures to maintain school image,
offer a curriculum and school culture that is attractive to parents, manage
increased and overt competition from newly funded and expanding private
schools and support the values and goals of the public education system
(see Section C)
- simplistic and standardised approaches -
to policy and its implementation, to accountability and student outcomes
and to schools - that work counter to the prevailing scholarship on reform
and leadership popularised in professional development activities (this
section and Section C)
- implementation of a complex range of new
curricula at the same time as moving rapidly to become fully digitised
and web- wise ( Section B and this section)
- make the job of the Principal increasingly
complex. It is little wonder that the literature is beginning to stress
deep coping skills ( Miles and Louis), emotional
management (Blackmore and Sachs), and balancing
work and life (Fullan and Hargreaves)(49).
This is a systemic issue. It is currently
dealt with on a case by case basis if a Principal succumbs to the demands
of the job. A minimal response is some ongoing monitoring of the pressures
involved and their toll on the emotional and physical health of the individual
Principals charged with the responsibility of running public schools. This
is hardly a luxury.
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